Too busy: when your full schedule is a problem

Being too busy may be okay in the short term, but in the long run, you won't have any energy left for your life. There are a few ways you can be too busy. You can be too busy in your head and you can be too busy in your daily life. Your work is too busy or you feel like you are too busy for a relationship or that your life in general is even too busy.

What is going on? And what can you do about it next?

Too busy in your head

If your mind is too busy, you tend to overthink things and may feel like you can’t stop it. For example, you might ruminate a lot, dwell on memories, and end up worrying as a result. You might have thoughts you don’t want at all and be plagued by thoughts related to certain fears.

This can even lead to mental health issues. People who suffer from depression, anxiety, and PTSD often also struggle with having too much going on in their heads[1].

One downside of having too much on your mind is that it can also make it difficult to sleep. For example, many people who worry can lie awake for hours as a result.

One way to get peace of mind is to practice meditation or even guided meditation. In a study comparing mindfulness meditation, progressive muscle relaxation meditation and love and kindness meditation on reducing thoughts that keep repeating themselves it was found that progressive muscle relaxation and love and kindness meditation helped best to create more peace in your mind[2].

Relaxing with hypnosis can also help with this. In fact, you will often be given a guided meditation with suggestions that will help you relax your muscles and feel more love and kindness for yourself. Many hypnotherapists also have audio recordings that they can give to their clients to help them get more relaxation.

In addition, I imagine that practicing mindfulness meditation can also help you get more peace of mind. Especially if you have all kinds of judgments about the thoughts you get, it can get very busy in your head. After all, you have a thought and then you may think it's stupid, which causes you to have even more thoughts.

With mindfulness meditation, you learn to let go of judgments about your thoughts, which can disrupt an entire thought pattern.

Research also shows that if you practice mindfulness meditation, it can eventually cause you to sleep better because you are no longer too busy in your head before bed[3].

Hypnotherapy can also be another solution for this, which is often a bit faster than if you have to practice a lot with mindfulness. In the process, you can then often turn on an audio recording before bed that helps you to be less busy in your head[4].

Too busy for a relationship

In addition to being too busy in your head, you can also be just too busy in your body. As in that you always have somewhere to be or something to do. Maybe for your family, friends and for work, and that can make you feel like you're too busy for a relationship.

Another thing you often see with young adults is that the idea that you are too busy or too young for a relationship can cause you to have casual sex (one night stand or friend with benefits) more often[5] and that often brings other risks, such as an STI or unwanted pregnancy.

So it could be that you are using your calendar to avoid committing to anyone. If you secretly do want a partner, but because you started using your schedule as a young adult to avoid it and are now finding out that you do miss something in life, it's time to break your ritual of being too busy for a relationship.

For example, you can work with a hypnotherapist to figure out why you find it difficult to make finding a partner a priority in your life. Could it be attachment anxiety? Or do you find it hard to set boundaries regarding your time at work or with friends and family? It could be a personal emotional barrier, or sometimes it’s more of a practical obstacle that simply requires you to stand up for yourself a little more.

That's what you can find out with a hypnotherapist.

The therapist can then help you gain more self-confidence while dating and open yourself up to a healthy connection with someone with whom you clearly click. This can be achieved through various suggestions and visualizations.

If you are already in a relationship, but you find that you are too busy to make the relationship work well, hypnotherapy can also help you reach a solution with your partner[6].

Too busy life

Do you sleep less than six hours a day and are busy doing anything and everything throughout the day? Then it is safe to say you have an overly busy life. Surely a person needs at least eight hours of sleep, and that one day of rest during the week is important in most of the world's religions for a reason. People used to understand that sometimes you need to be able to take a whole day to do nothing.

But if you’re already starting to feel guilty about an hour of doing nothing, there might be something wrong.

Time pressure is a problem for more and more people that also affects health. You have to work, and if you have a partner, they often have to, too. If you have a family on top of that, it gets really busy.

Then you also need time to work on your health, by exercising, for example, and to strengthen your social ties, those with family and friends[7]. This leaves almost no time for yourself.

The annoying thing is that being too busy is often even presented as something to be proud of[8]. But it’s as if you’re proud that you’re about to suffer from burnout. That doesn’t seem like something to be happy about at all.

However, it has a number of things that can make it important for your ego to be busy. After all, if you are busy it says something about your status and how important you are, because people make appointments with you. In addition, you may think that if you are busy other people think you are smart, successful and competent.

In the old days, and I'm talking about the 1930s and 1950s, people in the U.S. used to think we would only work 20 hours a week now and retire at 40. So something has gone very wrong there, that this prediction has not come true at all.

In addition, you may now think that taking time for yourself implies that there is something wrong with you, that you are up against burnout, for example. Or that you are a stupid woman who only wants to gossip with her friends and shop (or a man who wants to exercise too much or the like). Whereas you can set up time for yourself in lots of ways. But these are all beliefs that live among many people (source 8).

Time to do something about that.

If you feel you have an overly busy life but don't know how to change it because you think it has something to do with your identity , a hypnotherapist can help.

For example, who can help you figure out what beliefs cause you to care so much about being busy. Then it can help you double-check how logical or true those beliefs are. Sometimes just recognizing that a particular idea about how the world works and how you think other people think is not logical is enough to make yourself more of a priority.

In addition, techniques such as a progression can be used to help you create a plan to get more peace in your life. To stand up for yourself more and really enjoy me-time.

Even if that me-time is that you do indeed go shopping 😉 As long as it is not a new addiction replacing your addiction to "being busy.

You can also take away suggestions that you can repeat during self-hypnosis, such as:

"My busyness says nothing about my value."

"It's good to take a rest."

"I get to have time for myself."

These are just examples. Depending on your beliefs about the importance of being (too) busy, you may receive other suggestions that will help you return to relative peace of mind.

Want to learn more about how hypnosis can help with this? Then come to the free online master class.

Or sign up for one of our seminars or training programs.

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